Chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi

Chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhi almost did a vanishing act after Friday’s stampede tragedy at Gandhi Maidan.

He was the chief guest at the Ravan Vadh (burning of Ravan’s effigy) function. He left the venue around 6pm, soon after the ceremony got over. Eyewitnesses saw security personnel busy escorting him out of Gandhi Maidan while over five lakh people jostled for space to leave.

By 6.30, when Manjhi was speeding towards his ancestral village of Mahakar — on the Jehanabad-Gaya border around 70km south of Patna — a stampede ensued at the Maidan’s southern end. Around 32 people were declared “brought dead” at the Patna Medical College Hospital (PMCH). Another died in hospital.

Manjhi reached PMCH around 12.45am, nearly seven hours later, to be heckled by wailing relatives of the dead. It was not as if he was clueless. “My personal secretary informed me about the tragedy around 7.30pm, when I was barely 15 minutes from home. I spent only a few minutes before rushing back,” Manjhi told reporters at PMCH.

Sources said, if Manjhi had tried to return immediately after hearing of the tragedy, he would have been back at his 1 Aney Marg residence latest by 8.30 pm. “It would have given him adequate time to make a prompt assessment of the situation and act accordingly,” a senior official said.

But the chief minister preferred to head home, meet his family and eat paalak saag (spinach). “I have been going to my ancestral home on Dussehra for the last 60 years. As per family tradition, we eat saag together that day. I have never missed it in 60 years. So I completed the formality and returned to Patna,” he said.

Thus, the chief minister kept his date with the family ritual but missed the macabre dance of death in Patna.

JDU leaders and cadres are not openly coming out against the chief minister but many whom The Telegraph spoke to were visibly angry. “Yeh kaisa CM hai, Itne bade hadsa ke baad isse saag kaise khaya gaya (What type of chief minister is he? How did he manage to eat saag after such a grave tragedy),” asked a senior JDU leader under cover of anonymity. RJD boss Lalu Prasad — a partner in the RJD-JDU-Congress alliance — came down heavily on the government, describing the accident an administrative failure and sought action against the guilty.

On the opposition BJP’s demand that Manjhi quit as chief minister owning moral responsibility for the stampede tragedy, he said: “Such incidents happen in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan too. Do BJP leaders demand chief minister’s resignations in those states too? I have asked the ADG headquarters (Gupteshwar Pandey) and principal secretary, home, (Amir Subhani) to probe the incident and have announced Rs 3 lakh in compensation for relatives of the deceased. I am acting.”